Build Showcase: Dual 10 inch racks for networking and compute.

[MartinLenord]

I started out writing this post only to send myself down a spreadsheet filled rabbit hole of every piece of equipment and wired connection in my house, complete with connection speeds, power distribution specs, port numbers and locations. That might be a little overkill for the purpose of this showcase, but on the plus side, I now have documentation on where all the patch panel connections go to now, so I will take that as a win 😂

As the title suggests, I have two 10" racks set up, one in the loft and one in my office.

The one in the loft is a RackMate T1. This acts as the main rack for all my networking that then feeds out to other places in the house. It's in the loft because that was a relatively easy place to run all the networking to, from the other rooms in the house. Along with networking, it also houses a couple of Raspberry Pis that are used as NVRs.

The second rack is a RackMate T0, and this one lives in my office. The purpose of this rack is to both network the gear in my office, and provide an easily accessible testbed for whatever happens to be the current project/obsession I'm working on, e.g. The Framework desktop for playing with local AI, easy access to PoE for powering whatever might need it (usually something Raspberry Pi related), easy access to 240v power that doesn't involve climbing under my desk or unplugging something else and 2.5Gb networking for when the WiFi isn't enough.

A little more detail on each rack

Loft RackMate T1
From top to bottom

• 3 Gang PDU - At the back, so doesn't show on the photo.
• Unifi Cloud Gateway Fiber - I used to have an all TP-Link setup using Omada, however when I upgraded my internet to symmetric Gigabit I needed something faster than Gigabit as a backbone for my network and TP-Link didn't have much to offer in a reasonable formfactor or price range, hence the mixture of TP-Link and Unifi gear.
• 12 Port Patch Panel - To attempt to keep things tidy
• TP-Link SG2210P 8 Port PoE Switch - This switch is currently only Gigabit, and has most of the main network hung off it, including the two APs and the Raspberry Pi NVRs. I will likely upgrade it to a 2.5Gb PoE Unifi switch at some point, but the current switch is holding up ok for now.
• TP-Link OC200 Controller - Controller to manage all the TP-Link Omada gear on the network.
• TP-Link ES205GP 5 Port PoE Switch - I had a lot of stuff using PoE and the 8 port switch wasn't enough, so added another.
• 12 Port Patch Panel - More attempts to keep things tidy, plus room for expansion.
• Raspberry Pi 5 8GB with NVME base and PoE hat - This Pi runs Debian with Motioneye and records all the camera streams to an SSD attached to the NVME base. It's not the most advance recording setup, but it can just about handle basic motion detection on the 8 cameras around the house.
• Raspberry Pi 5 16GB with dual NVME base, Hailo 8L and PoE hat - Whilst Motioneye is ok, Frigate allows for a bunch more functionality along with actual object detection, so I have this Pi set up doing that. Whilst the feature set is broader with Frigate, I think object detection on 8 cameras is a little much for the Pi 5, even with the AI kit, so it often misses things, hence keeping the motioneye setup going.
• 200mm Fan - Took this off an old NZXT Phantom case I had and got a PoE to 12v converter and a 12v to fan header breakout board. You can see the dial to adjust the fan speed at the top right of the rack. Just a little airflow really helped keep the temps down.

Office RackMate T0
From top to bottom

• 3 Gang PDU - Because I can never have enough power...
• Framework Desktop 128GB - The most recent addition to the racks, I've mainly been using this for setting up some local LLMs for coding. It's currently running Ubuntu with a bunch of docker containers for llama.cpp, n8n, ComfyUi, and code-server, which gives a pretty decent VSCode experience, running in a browser with Github Copilot pointing at the local llama.cpp instance rather than the hosted models.
• TP-Link TL-SG1210MP 10 Port PoE Switch - An unmanaged PoE switch. This was actually the first PoE switch I got for powering a couple of cameras, before thing got out of hand... It's now just used as easy access to PoE for any projects I want to do at my desk
• 12 Port Patch Panel - Keeps things tidy, but also hides the 2.5Gb Unifi switch that is behind it.
• Unifi Flex 2.5G 5 Port Switch - This switch hides at the bottom of the rack and is powered by the one 2.5Gb PoE port on the UCG Fiber. This gives 2.5Gb networking to my normal desktop and the Framework desktop along with a connection to the PoE switch and NAS.

Not in a rack
This is a list of some of the things the racks are wired to but aren't necessarily mounted to them

• 6 x Raspberry Pi Zero 2 + Camera v3 - All the internal cameras in the house are Raspberry Pi Zeros powered over PoE with a Camera v3 module. They run motioneye to stream the camera feed to the NVR Pis in the loft.
• TP-Link EAP653 UR - An AP for upstairs in my office. At some point I'd like to move this over to a Unifi AP that can do 2.5Gb, but I have a few other things to upgrade before I get to that.
• TP-Link EAP610 - AP for downstairs. This one mostly handles 2.5Ghz IoT devices that are around the house.
• Reolink Camera & Doorbell - For exterior cameras I have a couple of Reolink cameras, one that also has a doorbell. They are both on a VLAN with no internet access and have their cloud management disabled, so that they instead just stream to the NVRs.
• Argon EON Raspberry Pi 4 NAS - Not the most practical, or cheapest NAS solution but it has 16TB of space for backups, and it does look cool...

TL;DR;
Two RackMate 10" racks with a mixture of Unifi and TP-Link gear, a Framework desktop for local AI and 9 Raspberry Pis acting as NVRs, NASs and cameras.

I haven't gone into detail on much of the software stack, this post is long enough already 😅 but if anyone has questions or suggestions, I'll do my best to answer.